Political culture

POLITICAL CULTUREREPORTED BY:

JOLLY RAY F. BEDERICO

POLITICAL CULTUREREPORTED BY:

JOLLY RAY F. BEDERICO

The assault on the United States on September 11, 2001 killed more people than any other single terrorist attack in history. So it is natural to ask what caused these events. And what motivated the terrorists to sacrifice their own lives in the process? Such questions are simple but the answers, of course, will be complex, involving many factors and disciplines.

INTRODUCTION

Still, we would probably want to begin with the political culture of the terrorists and of others in their network. Political culture is, after all, ‘the sum of the fundamental values, sentiments and knowledge that give form and substance to political processes.

So the starting point would be to describe the ‘values, sentiments and knowledge’ of the terrorists, beginning perhaps with their perceptions of the United States, which gave form and substance to their attack. In this way, political culture would help us to identify the first link in a long chain of causation.

INTRODUCTION

The events of 9/11 also show the importance of studying political culture comparatively. A full understanding of those events must surely involve comparing the cultures of Islam and Christianity, East and West and – perhaps above all – the dispossessed and the powerful.

But before we can proceed to a discussion of what Huntington (1996) claims is a ‘clash of civilizations’, we must explore how political culture has been treated in traditional political science. Here, the focus has been on how values, sentiments and knowledge influence politics within rather than between states.

In examining political culture within established democracies, we begin with Almond and Verba’s classic account before turning to ideas that have attracted more recent attention: trust, social capital and postmaterialism.

INTRODUCTION

The Civic Culture

THE classic study of political culture and democracy is Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture. Based on the surveys conducted during 1959-1960 in the USA, Britain, West Germany, Italy and Mexico, this landmarks investigation sought to identify the political culture within which is a liberal democracy is most likely to develop and consolidate. The study provides a helpful introduction to the topic.

The Civic Culture

Almond and Verba’s argument is based on a distinction between three pure types of political culture: the parochial, subject and participant. In a parochial political culture, first of all, citizens are only indistinctly aware of the existence of central government, as with remote tribes whose existence is seemingly unaffected by national decisions made by the central government.

The Civic Culture

In a subject political culture, second, citizens see themselves not as participants in the political process but as subjects of the government, as with people living under a dictatorship.

The third and most familiar type is the participant political culture. Here, citizens believe both that they can contribute to the system and that they are affected by it.

The Civic Culture

It would be natural to assume that people with participant attitudes are the model citizens of a stable democracy. But the interest of Almond and Verba’s study rests precisely in their rejection of such a proposition. Rather, the authors propose that democracy will prove most stable in societies blending different cultures in a particular mix they termed the ‘civic culture’

The Civic Culture

In this civic culture, many citizens are active in politics but the passive minority, whether parochials, subjects or both, provides stability to the system. Further, the participants are not so involved as to refuse to accept decisions with which they disagree. Thus the civic culture resolves the tension within democracy between popular control and effective governance: it allows for citizen influence while retaining flexibility for the governing elite.

The Civic Culture

It is possible, after all, that citizens believe they can influence government just because they can actually do so, a point that would suggest political culture reflects as much as it influences governme.nt

Political Trust and Social Capital

Times move on. In the decades following Almond and Verba’s study, many established democracies hit turbulent waters: Vietnam and student activism in the 1960s, the oil crisis of the 1970s, the anti-nuclear and ecology movements of the 1980s, privatization and cutbacks to the welfare state in the 1990s, terrorism in the 2000s.

More recent research in the area has therefore focused on whether established democracies have suffered a decline in political and social trust. And the answer, in general, is that they have, although the fall focuses on the public’s confidence in the performance of democratic institutions rather than on the principle of democracy itself.


The United States clearly illustrates the decline of trust in government. In 1964, three-quarters of Americans said that they trusted the federal government ‘to do the right thing’; by 1994, at the bottom of the cycle, only a quarter did so (Figure6.2). As Wuthnow (2002, p. 59) points out, much of this decline was brought about by specific events such as the Vietnam War and Watergate, with partial recoveries during periods of peace and prosperity.


Thus, trust recovered somewhat as the economy and stock market boomed in the late 1990s. Despite the intelligence failings exposed by September 11, faith in government received a massive short-term boost following the attacks as Americans rallied round the flag (Brewer et al., 1993). But contemporary faith in national government remains well below the levels recorded in the late 1950s, when Almond and Verba issued their positive appraisal of America’s civic culture.


The long-term trend in political trust slopes down in other democracies too. In the UK, for example, trust in government fell from 47 per cent in 1987 to 28 per cent in 2001 (Bromley and Curtice, 2002). So both the American and the British ‘civic cultures’ have witnessed a shift towards more sceptical and instrumental attitudes to politics since Almond and Verba’s study.


What are the consequences of falling confidence in political institutions? This question has preoccupied Putnam (2002) who suggests that a culture of trust oils the wheels of collective action, enabling projects to be initiated which would not be feasible in a society where mutual suspicion prevailed.


Putnam (1993) attempted to test these ideas to show how a supportive social environment, directly enhances the performance of a political system. In their original work, Almond and Verba had portrayed Italy as a country whose people felt uninvolved in, and alienated from, politics. At the time, Italy showed strong elements of the subject and parochial cultures. Putnam revisits Italy’s political culture, paying more attention to diversity within the country. He demonstrates how cultural variations within Italy influenced the effectiveness of the 20 new regional governments created in the 1970s. Similar in structure and formal po.wers, these governments nonetheless varied greatly in performance


The more effective governments in the north draw on a tradition of communal self-government dating from the twelfth century. The least successful administrations in the south are burdened with a long history of feudal, foreign, bureaucratic and authoritarian rule.

The idea of social capital extends the idea of trust beyond its political domain into the wider field of social relationships.


Within Europe, only Britain has shared the American pattern of a marked decline in interpersonal trust. The populations of both countries, it may be significant to note, are heavy viewers of television, a behaviour which reduces social contact and communication.

Nor do the connections between social and political trust seem to be strong. Newton found that ‘the correlations between trust in people and trust in government are so small that they can be ignored’.

Post-materialism

One factor which helps to account for developments in political culture, at both mass and elite level, is postmaterialism. Along with the themes of political trust and social capital, this notion illustrates how political scientists have sought to incorporate change into their understanding of political culture.

From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, the Western world witnessed a period of unprecedented economic growth. ‘You’ve never had it son good’ became a cliché that summarized the experience of the postwar generation. This era – long before 9/11 and the wars resulting from it – was also a period of relative international peace.

Post-materialism

According to Inglehart (1971, 1997), this unique combination of affluence, peace and security led to a silent revolution in Western political cultures.

From the 1960s, a new generation of postmaterialists emerged: young, well-educated people with concerns centred on lifestyle issues such as ecology, nuclear disarmament and feminism.

They give priority to self-expression and flexible rules. Postmaterialists are elite-challenging advocates of the new politics rather than elite-sustaining foot soldiers in the old party battles.

Post-materialism

In Europe postmaterialism came first to, and made deepest inroads in, the wealthiest democracies such as Denmark, the Netherlands and West Germany. The affluent Scandinavian countries (except Norway) also proved receptive to these values (Knutsen, 1990). Postmaterialism remains less common in poorer democracies with lower levels of education: for example, Greece.

Post-materialism

If other things remain equal, postmaterial values will become more prominent. When Inglehart began his studies in 1970–71, materialists outnumbered postmaterialists by about four to one in many Western countries. But by 2000 the two groups were much more even in size, a major transformation in political culture. Population replacement will continue to work its effect

Post-materialism

Experience of higher education is the best single predictor of a postmaterial outlook. Indeed ‘postmaterialism’ can be largely understood as the liberal outlook induced by degree-level education, especially in the arts and social sciences.

Post-materialism

Although postmaterialism is normally interpreted as a value shift among the population, its most important effects may be on political elites. Inglehart’s infantry are an active, opinion-leading group and already his shock troops have moved into positions of power, securing a platform from which their values can directly affect government decisions.

Post-materialism

For instance, the 1960s generation retained touches of radicalism even as it secured the seductive trappings of office. Thus, Bill Clinton (born 1946, the first president to be born after the war) offered a more liberal agenda to the American people than did his predecessor in the White House, George Bush (born 1924). These two meet belonged to different parties, to be sure, but they also represented contrasting generations.

Post-materialism

However, the political success of George W. Bush (born, like Clinton, in 1946) reminds us that postmaterialism may not carry all before it. In the short and medium term, direct political developments exert more influence over the cultural mood than long-term forces such as postmaterialism.

Political Culture in New Democracies

In new democracies, political culture offers less support to the system of government than is the case in established democracies. In part, this weakness derives from mere unfamiliarity with a new order. New rulers lack the authority which accrues naturally to a regime with a record of success. At the same time, they must confront the excessive expectations initiated by the overthrow of the old rulers; public opinion may expect too much, too quickly and above all too easily.


Since new democracies lack a reservoir of goodwill built up over generations, attitudes to the political system depend more on current performance. A new democracy which literally delivers the goods will engender supportive attitudes capable of sustaining it in the future.

Compared to these success stories, post-communist and post-colonial regimes have experienced more difficulty in delivering the performance needed to strengthen democratic commitment. Consider the post-communist countries. In the giddy moment of revolution in 1989, expectations ran away with themselves.


By the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, post-communist states had clearly diverged in the development of their political cultures. Most East European countries, for example Poland, had witnessed considerable economic recovery after the initial meltdown of the early and mid-1990s. Total production at last exceeded levels achieved under communism. The population began to learn that over the longer term, democracy could deliver an improved standard of living for most, if not all, the people. Prospective membership of the European Union offered a further stimulus to embracing a democratic culture.


In post-communist Asia, however, political leaders saw no reason to imitate Western models. Primitive pre-industrial economies declined rather than developed and authoritarian rule seemed thesurest guarantee of political stability. In any case, even the pre-communist heritage simply offeredweak foundations on which to build a democracy; Tismaneanu (1995) describes the political cultures of the Asian republics, such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as ‘antidemocratic, anti-liberal and ethnocentric


With Russia and China as powerful neighbours, regional politics in Asia were also less favourable to constructing a democratic culture than was the case in East Europe. In such circumstances, it would have required an astonishing economic transformation to induce a democratic orientation in either the political elite or the general population. Such agricultural societies may need a generation of industrialization, quite possibly state-led, before a democratic culture can emerge.

Political Culture in Authoritarian States

In the mature democracies of the West, political culture contributes to the stability of government, offering broad support to those charged with the task of ruling. Authoritarian rulers, by contrast, face characteristic problems arising from their unwillingness to confront the challenge of the ballot box. Lacking the legitimacy which flows from free election, such rulers must find other ways of responding to the political culture of the societies they govern. Broadly speaking, their options are threefold: to ignore, to manipulate or to seek to transform the existing political culture.

1. Ignoring political culture

Disregarding the political culture of the wider society is the tactic favoured by most authoritarian governments. Military rulers, for example, ride to power on a tank and show little concern for the niceties of political culture. Their task is to protect their own back against challengers seeking to supplant them.

In extreme cases, tyrants (civil or military) demand the submission of the populace, not its support. Yet it is a tribute to the power of political culture that such repressive survival strategies rarely succeed over the long term. In practice, naked power only prospers when wrapped in legitimacy’s clothes.

2. Manipulating political culture

The second approach is to exploit the political culture by selectively emphasizing its authoritarian elements. This strategy can be more effective over the long term. As Eckstein (1998a) remarks, an authoritarian government which is congruent with cultural values may prove to be more stable than a democratic regime which remains unnourished by the wider culture.

For instance, traditions of deference, and of personal allegiance to powerful individuals, are a cultural resource which many leaders in Asia and Latin America have exploited to the full to sustain their power.

Loyalty to the national leader is presented as a natural outgrowth either of the submission of the landless peasant to the powerful landowner or of the unforced obedience of the child to the parent.

The ruler is father and/or chief patron to the nation, providing security and stability but not democratic accountability

In pre-democratic Mexico, for example, scholars suggested that ‘underlying values were fundamentally authoritarian in the sense that Mexican children learned in the family to accept the authority of their fathers and they later transferred this acceptance of authority to political leaders, including the president’

3. Seeking to transform political culture

The most interesting approach to political culture in non-democratic regimes is to seek to reshape the country’s values. By definition, totalitarian regimes sought to transform the political values of their subjects. In Hitler’s Germany, for instance,, all textbooks had to conform to Nazi ideology and pupils were trained in arithmetic using examples based on ‘the Jewish question’.

But it was communist regimes which made the most systematic and long-lasting effort at transforming political culture. Their starting point was that the state must restructure the way people think and behave.

As Meyer (1983, p. 6) comments, communist revolutions were originally intended as cultural revolutions. Through education and persuasion, the aim was to create a new communist personality which would flourish in a classless, atheist society, free of the poisons inhaled under capitalism.

Take the Soviet Union and China as examples. In both countries the post-revolutionary communist rulers sought to increase mass participation in politics. Mass campaigns ensured that everyone became involved in politics. Yet the anticipated transformation of political culture never came about. Eventually, mass participation took on a purely ritual form, based on passive obedience to power rather than active commitment to communism. Fear created citizens who outwardly conformed but in reality adopted strategies designed to ensure their own survival: two persons in one body.

So communist reconstructions of political culture rarely succeeded in transforming might into right. Instead, they often strengthened critical attitudes to politics and depleted social capital by creating a social environment in which no one could be trusted. This negative climate continues to hold back the development of participatory cultures in post-communist countries

Elite Political Culture

Although the impact of mass political culture on political stability has been debated widely, the significance of elite political culture has been addressed less often. Yet in countries with a parochial or subject political culture, elite political culture is primary. Even where mass attitudes to politics are well-developed, as in consolidated democracies, it is still the views of the elite which exert the most direct effect on political decisions


As Verba (1987, p. 7) writes, the values of political leaders can be expected to have both ‘coherence and consequences’. Political leaders have, for example, proved central to recent democratic transitions. In this section, we examine elite political culture, again focusing on its consequences for political stability.


Elite culture is far more than a representative fragment of the values of the wider society. Throughout the world the ideas of elites are distinct from, though they overlap with, the national political culture. For example, leaders in democracies generally take a more liberal line on social and moral issues.


Stouffer’s (1966) famous survey of American attitudes to freedom of speech, conducted in 1954, confirmed this point. Stouffer showed that most community leaders maintained their belief in free speech for atheists, socialists and communists at a time when the public’s attitudes were much less tolerant. By the 1980s, surveys revealed a striking increase in the American public’s support for free speech (Weissberg, 1998). Nonetheless, it was crucial to the cause of free speech in the United States during the 1950s that a majority of the political elite resisted the strong pressure from Senator Joe McCarthy’s populist anti-communist witch-hunt (Fried, 1990).


In a similar way, many leaders of post-communist countries accept the need for a thorough transition to a market economy even while mass culture continues to find reassurance in the equality of poverty practised under communism.

Elite political culture consists of the beliefs, attitudes and ideas about politics held by those who are closest to the centres of political power.The values of elites are more explicit, systematic and consequential than are those of the population at large.


One reason for the liberal and sophisticatedoutlook of political leaders is their education; in most democracies, politics has become virtually a graduate profession. The experience of higher education nurtures an optimistic view of human nature, strengthens humanitarian values and encourages a belief in the ability of politicians to solve social problems (Farnen and Meloen, 2000). Indeed the contrast between the values of the educatedelite and the least educated section of the population is itself a source of tension in many political cultures


In assessing the impact of elite political culture on stability, three dimensions are crucial:

Does the elite have faith in its own right to rule? Does the elite accept the notion of a national

interest, separate from individual and group ambitions?

Do all members of the elite accept the rules of the game, especially those governing the transfer of power? (see Figure 6.3.)


The first and perhaps most vital component here is the rulers’ belief in their own right to rule. The revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe dramatically illustrate how a collapse of confidence among the rulers themselves can enforce a change of regime.


As Schöpflin (1990) points out, an authoritarian elite sustains itself in power not just through force and the threat of force but, more importantly, because it has some vision of the future by which it can justify itself to itself. No regime can survive long without some concept of purpose.


In the initial phase of industrialization, communist rulers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had good reason to believe their new planned economies were producing results. But by the late 1980s progress had given way to decline: industrial planning had reached a dead end.

As any remaining support from intellectuals faded, so party officials began to doubt their own legitimacy. In the end, communist rule was toppled so easily because it had already become enfeebled. Communist rulers were aware that they had become a barrier to, rather than a source of, progress. Elite values had ceased to underpin the system of government. By contrast, economic growth continues apace in contemporary China, sustaining the elite’s confidence in its own legitimacy.

A more recent example of elite political culture sustaining non- or semi-democratic government is rule by experts. Latin America provides the best recent instances of this technocratic culture. The ‘techno-boys’ were a cohort of European- or American-trained graduates (mainly in economics or engineering) who influenced economic policymaking in much of the continent, notably Chile, in the final decades of the twentieth century. While communist rulers were losing faith in their right to rule, the techno-boys possessed every confidence in the validity of their own prescriptions.

When supported by a strong political leader, these specialists were able to impose harsh monetary remedies on countries where financial discipline had often taken second place to political requirements. Because the authority of these specialists derived in part from their self-belief, Centeno and Silva (1998, p. 3) were surely justified in concluding that ‘an elite culture links all of the different historical apparitions of expert rule’ on the continent. Rule by experts provided an instance where the technical, depoliticized views of an educated elite came to dominate the political agenda

Technocracy is rule by experts, a temporary form of rule that sometimes emerges after a period of poor governance.The term implies rule by specialists with expertise in non-political subjects, often economics and engineering.The word itself was coined by William Smyth, an engineer based in California, who founded Technocracy, Inc. in 1919.Today, a technocrat denotes a specialist with a job or outlook that is technical rather than political.


The second aspect of elite political culture lies in its approach to the national interest. At issue here is the attitude of rulers to the government posts they hold. Is public service seen as just that – a way of serving the national interest? Some national bureaucracies, from France to Pakistan, have seen themselves as guardians of the nation even to the point of protecting their country from ‘mere politicians’. Latin America’s technocrats are again an example: they assumed that their assessment of the country’s long-term economic interests should take priority over the preferences of specific social groups.


More often in the developing world, the state is seen by its ruling elite as a seam of scarce resources to be mined for the benefit of the rulers, their families, their constituents and members of their ethnic group. This approach predominates where economic resources are scarce and – just as important – where state institutions are weak. Both factors apply to many post-colonial countries. In post-communist countries, too, officials who survived the collapse of the old order often gained personally from acquiring public assets through corrupt privatizations.


It would of course be naive to suppose that politicians anywhere are guided solely by the national interest. However, at a minimum, elite values should not condone self-interested behaviour which threatens the collective interest. When exposed, corruption should generate criticism, not a mere shrug of the shoulders.


The third dimension of elite political culture, and one with obvious implications for political stability, is the attitudes which politicians hold to the rules of the game. A range of possibilities existshere. Is elite competition absolute, as in divided countries such as Northern Ireland where gains to one side (Protestant or Catholic) were traditionally viewed as losses by the other?


Alternatively, is strong party conflict moderated by agreement on the rules of the competition, as in mainland Britain, thus rendering political stability consistent with vigorous political debate?

The consequences of these attitudes to the political game are highly significant. As an example of unmoderated conflict, consider America’s Watergate scandal (1972–73), during which President Nixon’s Republican supporters engaged in illegal acts such as break-ins and phone-taps against their Democratic opponents.

This unhappy episode reflected the President’s own stark view of politics: ‘us’ against ‘them’. Nixon was willing to dispense with the normal rules to ensure that his enemies ‘got what they deserved’. In the USA, of course, most politicians do support the rules of the game as set out in the country’s constitution. If Nixon’s attitudes predominated among America’s elite, its democracy would be far less stable.


When party or group leaders are willing to compromise to allow the expression of other interests and values, the prospects for political stability improve. In a classic analysis, Lijphart (1977) suggested that just such an accommodating attitude prevailed among group leaders in divided societies such as Austria and the Netherlands in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, religion still strongly divided these countries, with considerable physical separation between the various communities. In the Netherlands, for example, the Catholics, Protestant and secular communities formed separate subcultures or ‘pillars’. The issue was how these pillars could be integrated to form a stable democratic culture


Crucially, the leaders of each pillar accepted the right of each group to a fair share of state resources. The leaders privately agreed among themselves, and in private, on how to slice the national pie. However, each group then controlled the distribution of its own resources; so that Catholics, for example, might give higher priority to welfare while socialists allocated more money to education. In this way, a culture of accommodation among the elite allowed separate and even hostile communities to live together within the one state. Today, religious divisions have softened but compromise remains a key theme in Dutch political culture.


Elite accommodation as a formula for managing divided but separate communities is still relevant today, particularly in post-conflict situations where distrust between subcultures remains high. For example, the device might have value in Sri Lanka following its long period of fighting between the Sinhalese majority and the minority Tamils. Elite compromise offers a form of informal federalism, casting light on the key issue of how hostile communities can learn to live together even when the foundations are too insecure to support the elaborate architecture of formal federation.

Political Socialization

Political socialization is the means by which political culture is transmitted across the generations. It is a universal process. All societies must find a way of passing on the skills needed for people to perform political roles, varying from voting at an election to governing the country. The key point about socialization is that it is largely an uncontrolled and uncontrollable process. No matter how much rulers try, they find themselves unable to dominate either its process or content. By its nature, therefore, socialization serves to replicate the status quo. As a result, political culture becomes a stabilizing force, providing a major barrier against planned change.


Political socialization is the process through which we learn about politics. It concerns the acquisition of emotions, identities and skills as well as information. Its main dimensions are what people learn (content), when they learn it (timing and sequence) and from whom (agents).


Learning a political culture is very different from acquiring formal knowledge of politics as obtained, say, from this book. Political socialization is a more diffuse, indirect and unplanned process. It involves the development of political emotions and identities (what is my country? My religion? my party?) as well as the acquisition of information. Political socialization takes place through a variety of institutions – the family, peer group and workplace – and is as much influenced by the context of communication as its content. For example, children’s attitudes toward politics are influenced by their experience of authority at home and at school at least as much as by the preachings of parents and teachers.


Most studies of political socialization are based on the primacy model. This holds that basic political loyalties are formed when young. Childhood learning is ‘deep learning’ because it provides a framework for interpreting further information acquired in adulthood. Core political identities are developed in early childhood, when the family is the critical influence on the child. In late childhood, these attachments are supplemented by a marked increase in information. The main effect of adolescence is to refine the child’s conceptual understanding, building on information already obtained.

These three stages of socialization – early childhood, late childhood and adolescence – prepare the child for political participation in adult political life (Figure 6.4). Adult experiences modify but rarely transform the outlook secured when young.


Some authors use Asian cultures to illustrate the centrality of childhood to political socialization. The argument advanced is that strong family traditions encourage a group-centred style of adult politics in which deference to authority places a leading role. For instance, Pye (1985) suggests that the cornerstone of powerbuilding in the Asian cultures is loyalty to a collectivity. Out of the need to belong, to submerge one’s self in a group identity, is power formed in Asian cultures.


But what is the origin of this need to belong and conform? Pye suggests that the answer lies in the experience of childhood. The Asian child, perhaps more than elsewhere, finds unconditional love and attention from the family. As a result, the child respects and does not question parental authority, leading to similar deference to political rulers later in life. This acceptance of benevolent leadership (or perhaps more accurately a reluctance to express open dissent) is supposedly characteristic of ‘Asian democracy’.


Although most research on political socialization has focused on children, we must remember that the process is lifelong; basic political outlooks mature in response to events and experience, and political learning does not stop at childhood’s end (Conover and Searing, 1994). Indeed we can contrast the primacy model with an alternative recency model. This is the idea that current information carries more weight just because it is contemporary.

What we see on television today matters more than submerged childhood memories; in other words, adult reality packs more punch than childhood myths. In the eighteenth century, Montesquieu (1748) observed that we receive three educations: one from our parents, another from our teachers, and a third from the world. The third contradicts all the first two teach us.


The recency approach undoubtedly carries some plausibility. Adult experiences of such major events as war or depression surely leave their mark, helping to shape the political outlook of a generation. There can be no doubt, for example, that September 11, 2001 coloured the approach of American politicians to subsequent foreign policy decisions, just as the scars of Vietnam discouraged the previous generation of leaders from military adventures. But crises such as 9/11 are exceptional. Routine events come and go but most often they are viewed through – rather than overriding – established perspectives, notably those acquired during childhood.

Islam and the West

To conclude our discussion, we examine the value of political culture in understanding the relationship between Islam and the West. Such a comparison has acquired added significance since 9/11 but also possesses two further advantages. First, it takes us beyond the state towards a more global perspective. Second, the comparison raises the topic of religion, a dimension of culture that we have not so far addressed. To what extent, then, should the current division between the Muslim and the Western worlds be viewed as a conflict of political cultures?

Islam and the West

Huntington’s view derives from a broader analysis, published before September 11, 2001, in which he suggests that cultures based on civilizations rather than countries will become the leading source of conflict in the twenty-first century.

Islam and the West According to Huntington, the old base of international

conflict between the communist Soviet Union and the free market United States is exhausted. But the end of the cold war, he suggests, does not mean the end of cultural divisions. Rather the focus will shift from a battle of ideologies to a clash of civilizations, an irreducible division between the world’s major cultures, including Islam and the West (Box 6.1). Since such groupings are supranational, Huntington (1996, p. 20) implies that political culture has escaped its national moorings to embrace wider but still competing identities:

A civilization-based world order is emerging: societies sharing cultural affinities cooperate with each other; efforts to shift societies from one civilization to another are unsuccessful; and countries group themselves around the lead of core states of their civilization.

Islam and the West

Between the contradictory worldviews of these civilizations, suggests Huntington, there is little common ground or room for compromise. As globalization proceeds, interaction and friction will intensify, producing a high potential for conflict.

Islam and the West

He notes, for example, how cultural kinship influences the choice of sides in recent wars: ‘in the Yugoslav conflicts, Russia provided diplomatic support to the Serbs . . . not for reasons of ideology or power politics or economic interest but because of cultural kinship’ (1996, p. 28). Huntington is also sceptical of pragmatic efforts toswitch civilizations, suggesting that the reason Australia failed to reinvent itself as an Asian country was simply that it’s not.

Islam and the West

In discussing the specific relationship between Islam and Christianity, Huntington draws on these civilizational themes. The transnational characterof civilizations is indeed exemplified by these religions, each of which pre-dates the emergence of states. Thus, in medieval Europe, Christendom stood above kingdoms in the political hierarchy. Similarly, contemporary Muslim countries form an Islamic domain in which a shared religious commitment transcends national divisions.

Huntington defines civilizations as the broadest cultural, entities in the world; they are ‘cultures writ large’. He divides the world into six or seven major civilizations:1. Western2. Japanese3. Islamic4. Hindu5. Slavic–Orthodox6. Latin American7. (possibly) African

Such divisions pose special problems for torn countries located on the fault-lines between civilizations. Mexico (situated between the West and Latin America) and Turkey (on the border between the West and Islam) are examples of such split countries

Islam and the West

Although the origins of the conflict between Islam and the West may lie in religion, Huntington argues that the contemporary division is cultural or civilizational rather than religious. With the Islamic world falling ever further behind the West in science, technology and wealth, it is no longer the West’s Christian foundations, but rather its secular character as exemplified by American materialism, which has become the target of Islamic criticism

Islam and the West

As would be expected for a civilizational divide, differences in socialization underpin and perpetuate these cultural differences. Western education is avowedly secular, allowing schooling to concentrate on scientific knowledge and technical training. But in many Muslim countries, literal instruction in the Koran (Islam’s holy text) remains a major theme of education, ill-preparing young people – male as well as female – for the modern world.

The upshot is that Huntington (1996, p. 217) portrays Islam and the West as civilizations locked in permanent and seemingly unavoidable conflict: The underlying problem of the West is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and who believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world.

Islam and the West

Although Huntington’s analysis is clear and straightforward, its sweeping character also provides its weakness. Indeed, the widespread criticism of his discussion helps to identify the limits of political culture as a tool for political analysis. Huntington’s work is pitched at an extremely general level, showing insufficient sensitivity to variations within civilizations. Just as Almond and Verba underplayed subcultures within the countries they surveyed, so Huntington discounts variation within civilizations across space and time.

Islam and the West

Stepan (2001, p. 234) is surely closer to the mark when he interprets Islam as ‘multivocal’, capable of varying its voice across place and time. In similar fashion, Feldman (2000) describes Islam as a ‘mobile idea’. Thus, both Turkey and Saudi Arabia are Muslim countries but Turkey’s state is secular and largely democratic whereas Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian regime leading a society dominated by a severe form of Islam. The reaction to September 11 confirms Islam’s multivocal character: the hijackers undoubtedly drew on one anti-Western dialect within Islam but most Muslims, like most Christians, regarded the attacks as morally unjustified (Saikal, 2003, p. 17).

Islam and the West

So, like any other dimension of political culture, such as America’s commitment to freedom or the French idea of equality, Islam is a resource which can be used and developed in innumerable ways according to political circumstances to which Huntington devotes insufficient attention. In political analysis, we should avoid an ‘essentialist’ reading of Islam focused on its inherent characteristics which assumes all believers speak with one voice (Lane and Ersson, 2002, p. 158).

Islam and the West

Over time, too, the nature of Islam, and its relationship with the West, has varied. The potential for conflict with the West may be inherent but this potential often remains latent. Saikal (2003, p. 24) writes that ‘since the advent of Islam in the early seventh century, relations between its domain and the largely Christian West have been marked by long periods of peaceful coexistence but also by many instances of tension, hostility and mutual recrimination’.

Islam and the West

As long as civilizations are conceived as static, it is difficult to account for variability in the relationship between them. Huntington’s expansive claim that the West’s problem is ‘not Islamic fundamentalism but Islam’ does indeed involve a breathtaking dismissal of entire centuries:

The causes of this ongoing pattern of conflict [between Island and the West] lie not in transitory phenomena such as twelfth century Christian passion or twentieth century Muslim fundamentalism. They flow from the nature of the two religions and the civilizations based on them.

(Huntington, 1996, p. 210)

Islam and the West

Rather than regarding Muslim fundamentalism as ‘a transitory phenomenon’, we should seek to locate its emergence in the events of the twentieth century, an approach which takes us away from political culture towards more specific themes in political history. Brzezinski’s list (2002, p. 18), for instance, would probably be acceptable to many:

Islam and the West

Arab political emotions have been shaped by the region’s encounter with French and British colonialism, by the defeat of the Arab effort to prevent the existence of Israel and by the subsequent American support for Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians, as well as by the direct injection of American power into the region.

Islam and the West

So political culture (or equivalent terms such as civilization) can only take us so far. Culture identifies the general climate but fails to offer specific forecasts. As Roy (199is never directly explanatory and in fact conceals all that is rupture and history: the importation of new types of states, the birth of new social classes and the advent of contemporary ideologies’. By itself, terms such as ‘political culture’ and ‘civilization’ are blanket explanations, offering wide coverage but also obscuring the intricate detail underneath.

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